Ethnography of an auto body repair class: Some implications for cultural transmission

This paper is a study of an ethnography of an auto body repair class in a postsecondary technical school. The class provides the students with the auto body repair skills. The students also learn employer/worker relationships and worker/worker relationships. The students learn their skills by doing them. They learn the role of a worker by being in a situation which simulates an auto body shop situation.     

A case study approach to delivering and evaluating services by a school psychologist

Two interrelated problems in delivering school psychological services by one school psychologist acted as a motivating force behind this study: the problem of how to plan and render services to a school system where the ratio of students to school psychologists is high, and the problem of how to determine the degree of effectiveness of these services. This study describes an approach which consisted of three distinct services rendered by a school psychologist. Evaluative measurements of the services were made in two areas: the effect of the services on the ongoing operations of the system, and the evaluation of the services by school personnel exposed to the services directly or indirectly. The relative merits and the limitations of such an approach are discussed.     

Modeling spatial knowledge

A person's cognitive map, or knowledge of large-scale space, is built up from observations gathered as he travels through the environment. It acts as a problem solver to find routes and relative positions, as well as describing the current location. The TOUR model captures the multiple representations that make up the cognitive map, the problem-solving strategies it uses, and the mechanisms for assimilating new information. The representations have rich collections of states of partial knowledge, which support many of the performance characteristics of common-sense knowledge.     

Investigative versus realistic Holland types and adjustment in theoretical engineering majors

This study tested the sensitivity of J. L. Holland's (Making vocational choices: A theory of careers, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973) congruence method for predicting differential outcomes in the case of subtle person-environment congruence differences. This question is relevant to engineering programs, where students with adjacent Holland orientations of Investigative (I) and Realistic (R) aspire to complete theoretically oriented engineering majors, such as electrical and mechanical engineering. It was hypothesized that high congruence (e.g., I-type student in I-type engineering major) compared to moderately high congruence (e.g., R-type in I-type major) would result in more positive educational outcomes. A preliminary analysis verified that subgroups of I- and R-type students possessed similar scores on measures of general and math aptitude. Results on both outcome measures favored the high student-curriculum congruence hypothesis. I- compared to R-type subjects demonstrated greater persistence in their initial engineering major over a 2-year period and attained higher grades. Persistence findings replicated across two separate classes of entering students, but academic performance differences were not as consistent.     

Stage order and dominance in adolescent vocational decision-making processes: An empirical test of the Tiedeman-O'Hara paradigm

Multidimensional scaling procedures were applied to checklist measures of stages from O. V. Tiedeman and R. P. O'Hara Career development: Choice and adjustment, New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1963, vocational decision-making paradigm. Responses from two high-school samples were analyzed in order to test the hypotheses that stages are ordered as theory predicted and that stages represent dominant psychological states. The stage order hypothesis was essentially supported by findings from scaling solutions applied to two 11th-grade and one ninth-grade sample. The important exception was that the last two stages were reversed. Apparently grade level was not the dimension on which stages unfolded. The stage dominance hypothesis was not supported by the evidence. Student responses were not predominantly associated with a single stage but rather were distributed over several stages. Both results were interpreted in terms of the theory and the instruments. A second conclusion was that metric unfolding is a useful method for analyzing cross-sectional data bearing on construct validity for ordered stage constructs.     

A heuristic method for the comparison of related structures

By extending a technique for testing the difference between two dependent correlations developed by Wolfe, a strategy is proposed in a more general matrix context for evaluating a variety of data analysis schemes that are supposed to clarify the structure underlying a set of proximity measures. In the applications considered, a data analysis scheme is assumed to reconstruct in matrix form the given data set (represented as a proximity matrix) based on some specific model or procedure. Thus, an evaluation of the adequacy of reconstruction can be developed by comparing matrices, one containing the original proximities and the second containing the reconstructed values. Possible applications in multidimensional scaling, clustering, and related contexts are emphasized using four broad categories: (a) Given two different reconstructions based on a single data set, does either represent the data significantly better than the other? (b) Given two reconstructions based on a single data set using two different procedures (or possibly, two distinct data sets and a common method), is either reconstruction significantly closer to a particular theoretical structure that is assumed to underlie the data (where the latter is also represented in matrix form)? (c) Given two theoretical structures and one reconstruction based on a single data set, does either represent the reconstruction better than the other? (d) Given a single reconstruction based on one data set, is the information present in the data accounted for satisfactorily by the reconstruction? In all cases, these tasks can be approached by a nonparametric procedure that assesses the similarity in pattern between two appropriately defined matrices. The latter are obtained from the original data, the reconstructions, and/or the theoretical structures. Finally, two numerical examples are given to illustrate the more general discussion.     

Sources of error in the psychoeducational diagnosis of children

A detailed exploration of the role of diagnostic practices is presented, with special attention given to such practices in school psychology. Basic principles related to diagnostic typology and concepts of reliability and validity are reviewed in the context of recent diagnostic decision-making research. Finally, the intrusion and eventual reduction of particular errors of consistency and inconsistency and psychodiagnosis are examined with a view toward improvements in future training and practice.     

The effects of positive examiner verbal comments on the total WISC-R performance of institutionalized EMR students

Forty educably mentally retarded (EMR) students were randomly selected and assigned to one of two treatment groups. Students in the experimental group were verbally praised after their responses to the WISC-R questions, while the students in the control group received nonevaluative procedural comments. The scaled scores for five of eleven subtests, in addition to the Verbal, Performance and Full Scale indices, were significantly greater under the experimental procedure. The treatment's efficacy and considerations for future research were noted and discussed.